There’s been much talk of late about fissures in the Republican Party. It’s not just MAGA vs. “GOPE” — the GOP Establishment. That’s old news. The Epstein files are newer news, which Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) says have “ripped MAGA apart.” Then there’s MTG’s resignation, and her blast at President Donald Trump, which he, of course, reciprocated.
Oh, and whatever Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have said about Ben Shapiro or Mark Levin — and vice versa. Plus Vice President JD Vance’s critique of the late Dick Cheney.
Plenty of policy differences, too, within the party, most notably Reagan-Bush internationalism vs. America First, with whatever ruction is to come over a possible Ukraine deal. Speaking of policy, the Heritage Foundation…
REPUBLICANS MUST REJECT THE CULT OF CREEPS
Healthy debate is fine, and yet what’s unnerving has been the surfacing of the “N” word — Nazi. Laura Loomer, who has fought her share of feuds, says the GOP has a “Nazi problem.” She’s talking about podcast provocateur Nick Fuentes, who has said, for instance, “Hitler was a pedophile and sort of a pagan. Well, he was also really f___ing cool.”
In the meantime, the Main Stream Media, still a force, stands ready to wedge wider Republican divides. The New York Times, the most forceful of the MSM, seems happy portraying Fuentes, who holds no elective office, into a GOP star, running 11 stories on him in the last month. The Times’ effort even includes a photo of Fuentes that vaults him up into Luigi Mangione-levels of anti-hero hunk.
Yet before we overdetermine the right-wing crack-up, we might step back and recall the many fissile moments of the last century.
In the 1910s and 20s, the Republican Party was split between regulars and progressives. In fact, twice, in 1912 and 1924, renegade Republicans launched major third-party campaigns against an incumbent GOP president.
During the 1930s, the party was split between isolationists and interventionists. That split carried on after World War Two, in the form of Joe McCarthy vs. the establishment, and then, relatedly, Robert Taft vs. Dwight Eisenhower.
In the 1960s and 70s, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan were two more Republican rams against establishmentarianism. In the 90s came the rebellions of four more right-of-center figures, David Duke, Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, and Newt Gingrich. During the Iraq and Afghanistan 00s came a new surge in anti-interventionist thinking, typified by Ron and Rand Paul. In the 10s and now 20s, Donald Trump.
We can step back and see: The conservative movement and/or the GOP has been fissioned, bigly, a half-dozen times. Yet in each instance, it managed to fuse itself back together. To be sure, the movement and the party have changed; New England, once rock-ribbed Republican, albeit not all that conservative, is now Democratic and progressive, whereas most of the South is now MAGA.
Some will assert of course, that the situation is worse today, that insurgent figures such as Fuentes are worse than past Republican insurgents. And that might prove true. We can’t know the future, even as we consider the possibility that Fuentes may prove to be nothing more than just a loudmouth. We should keep in mind that over the last century, some on the right have lionized such mephitic figures as Hitler and Mussolini when they were actually alive and evildoing. If we’re thoughtful enough to be interested in Republican Party history, we should be smart enough to avoid presentism, the narcissistic feeling that one’s own time is unique.
So perhaps the story of Republican fusionism, with all its evolutions, remains compelling — even if the would-be splitters on the left, eager to divide the right, show no interest in the possibility of conservative renewal. Fortunately, conservatives have one of their own, Daniel J. Flynn, to provide them with some usable, fusible history, The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer.
The term “invented” in the title may understandably give readers pause; after all, neither Aristotle, Aquinas, nor Burke would recognize Meyer as the originator of conservatism. Even so, Flynn makes a compelling case that Meyer played a pivotal role in forging the right’s intellectual and partisan fusion in the 20th century.
Born to affluence in 1909, young man Meyer drifted through different dalliances, including a poetic fling with John Milton’s Satan. During those years, the epicurean but cerebral Meyer wafted through Princeton, Oxford, the London School of Economics, and the University of Chicago.
Meanwhile, the Depression struck, and Meyer, like many intellectuals, gave his heart to communism. Here, Flynn, a veteran scribe for The American Spectator and author of six previous books, cuts in with incisive editorializing: “Even the alphabet hints at the short distance between Satan and Stalin.”
In the 1930s and early 40s, Meyer was a good communist, but not a great communist. Loyally joining the U.S. Army in World War II, he washed out for health reasons, and yet along the way, he noticed that his fellow GIs were Americans hoping for a nice life, not proletarians yearning for Bolshevism.
Meyer’s sneaking suspicion that the red god had failed titrated in 1944, when he read Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Flynn inserts the sly point that Hayek was his own kind of fusionist: “Hayek’s less doctrinaire brand of Austrian economics, pragmatically tolerating the existence of some aspects of the welfare state . . . made past poison potable.”
Meyer’s review, appearing in New Masses, proved that he was, by now, a bad communist. The magazine reviewer found himself agreeing with the book author that “government economic planning demands the accumulation of immense power in central organs.” That was scary to Meyer, and he said so—and that was his last writing as a red.
Yet actually exiting the communist party was not risk-free. Meyer was well aware, for instance, of the 1937 assassination of Juliet Poyntz by Stalinist agents. Flynn, who knows this territory, cites historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, who found that the number of murders within the U.S. committed by Stalin’s henchmen to be “at least five hundred and probably more than a thousand.”
Still, by 1947, Meyer was willing to cooperate with the FBI and congressional investigators as they commenced the long-overdue process of sweeping reds out from under beds.
The following year, Meyer read Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences. Flynn writes that the book had such a “profound influence on him that he later called it the fons et origo of the conservative movement.”
By now, Meyer was fully fused into conservatism and Republicanism. Yet he maintained some of his comradely thinking, including on the value of a “popular front.” That is, the broadest possible support consistent with the party line.
Such coalitionism was seen in Meyer’s 1953 review of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. To Meyer, the tome was a “repudiation of the American fusion of individualism and conservatism.”
There’s the “f” word, fusion, soon to be rendered as fusionism. As Flynn tells it, Meyer feared that “Kirk’s conception of conservatism… banished libertarians to the ideologue camp along with Marxists.” If so, then a matter of electoral mathematics, the cause of the right (setting aside Kirk’s view that libertarians weren’t conservative) would be diminished.
Fusionism is often described as a three-legged stool, the legs being economic, social, and foreign policy, and yet Meyer’s conception was both less complicated and more profound. Pointing to American history, he urged finding “virtue in freedom.” This twinning of personal liberty and self-discipline, writ large across politics, is Meyer’s enduring claim to political relevance, if not quite personal renown.
Meyer developed his theme further in a 1962 volume, In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo. Flynn writes: “The underlying idea that the American Founding’s significance involved advancing freedom and that American conservatives necessarily find freedom as their nation’s tradition attracted conservatives because of its simplicity and truth.”
And while Meyer’s book is not widely known, it reaches deep. Flynn is correct when he avers, “One grasps the most compelling proof of the book’s influence by listening to conservatives who have never read it nevertheless recapitulate its themes.”
In 1955, Meyer caught on with a startup, National Review. To be sure, other conservative publications had existed, and yet NR had mojo: It had Bill Buckley. He was possessed of money and class, of course, and yet he also had fusionist skill, the ability to think of the magazine as a place where smart people could come together as a team, albeit a team of rivals.
Flynn captures the teapot-tempests in a dense paragraph recalling intra-magazine maneuvering:
Kendall’s quarrels threatened to implode the burgeoning anti-Burnham coalition. With Kendall and Bozell, Meyer enjoyed a solid bloc capable of blocking the magazine from embracing Burnhamite positions. Unlike Schlamm, Kendall remained on the masthead as a senior editor. But he hung on tenuously. For reasons including friendship with Buckley and the alliance he forged to thwart Burnham, Meyer labored to keep Kendall within the magazine. Kendall, for his part, worked equally hard to give Buckley reasons to fire him.
Yet Meyer kept focused on fusion. In 1958, he wrote to Buckley: “If the Republican Party cannot get some grip of the actual world we live in and from it generalize and actively promote a program that means something to the masses of people, why, somebody else will.”
These political goals were soon to be tested, as conservatives confronted the John Birch Society, an anti-communist organization that took a good thing too far. Actually, way too far, as when its founder, Robert Welch, accused President Eisenhower of being a “dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy.” We can observe: Anti-communism = good. Proto-QAnon, masquerading as anti-communism = bad.
Meyer wrote a memo to Buckley and others in 1961. Flynn’s book is enormously strengthened by a heretofore undiscovered cache of Meyer’s personal papers in an Altoona, PA warehouse, assessing that if the magazine wished to be the “conscience of American conservatism,” it confronted “a responsibility both morally and politically to which we have to face up.”
As a practical political matter, such facing up meant anathematizing Birch leadership without antagonizing the mass of Birchers who were, after all, voters.
In Flynn’s telling, NR handled this matter well, marginalizing Welch while retaining the Bircher base. Unsurprisingly, there’s scholarship from the left that takes a different view, and yet that just makes the topic all the meatier, worthy of further study. In any case, the John Birch Society still exists today, and yet over the last six decades, the Republican Party has done fine.
Meyer died in 1972 at the relatively young age of 62. He was a chain smoker. Flynn piles on the posthumous credit: “In the 1940s, Frank Meyer changed his mind. By the end of the 1980s, he had changed the world.”
All true, and yet today, ghosts from the past are rising: We can see.
Parallels between the Birchers of six decades ago — and other even scarier types, and Fuentes’ “Groypers” of today.
To be sure, it’s possible that the Groypers will prove to be an illusion — a fad, a bunch of kids doing LOL. Yet even so, for Republicans, they are already at least something of a political millstone. Fuentes & Co. are, after all, the object of copious opposition research that Democrats are eager to amplify.
Working from such material, the left-wing agenda-setting Guardian declared on November 20, “Fuentes has ascended in recent weeks from the influential but unacknowledged outer dark of the American right to a position within striking distance of the mainstream Republican party.” Most Republicans might not think this is true, and yet if the MSM is reporting it as true, then the right must make an extra effort to rebut.
In the meantime, there’s at least some evidence that harm has been done. Pointing to exit poll data from the recent GOP defeats in the 2025 elections, longtime conservative operative Diana Banister puts it bluntly in the Examiner: “Republicans must reject the cult of creeps.” Yes, there’s the pseudo-fusionist concept of “no enemies on the right,” but even if one leaves aside morality, there’s practicality; if they repel more votes than they attract, they’re a bad deal.
So today’s effective fusionists, operating mindfully of Meyer, should shun Fuentes and speak instead to his followers, encouraging them to pursue, instead, a more civil and constructive path, which is also the way to win elections.
Of course, the unifying right will soon have help from outside its camp. In New York City, Zohran Mamdani is about to take power. Mamdani calls himself a socialist, but surely Meyer would cut to the chase, and tag him as a communist. As they say, it takes one to know one.
In the meantime, as he moves around, seeking the most attention, Fuentes himself could finally do the Republicans a favor — by becoming a Democrat. He said recently, “The left has to give up immigration, the right has to give up on the free market.”
So here’s a suggestion to the GOP: Do not give up on the free market, hoping that a rebuffed Fuentes migrates over to Mamdanism. History tells us that many right-wing nuts have become left-wing nuts; the horseshoe and red-brown alliance have been real.
REPUBLICANS MUST REJECT THE CULT OF CREEPS
None of this is especially edifying for anyone who cares about decency or civility in American life. But fusionists would argue that their mission isn’t to perfect individuals, it’s to build coalitions, win elections, and advance a cause. That means keeping the right’s own house in order without indulging in endless self-flagellation over fringe figures. At the same time, Meyer-style fusionists would keep their focus on resisting the many tentacles of the left, regardless of whether the “hate-beat” reporters at the New York Times or other mainstream outlets bother to notice. The right has developed its own mediating institutions. It’s time to let them flex.
Meyer has been gone for more than a half-century and yet his wisdom still has wings: If conservatives want to win, they must unite their coalition around the common causes of liberty and decency.
James P. Pinkerton served in the White House domestic policy offices of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. For two decades, he was a Fox News Contributor.